Inside ‘The Good Wife’ Season 3

The creators of "The Good Wife," Robert and Michelle King, discuss Season 3, Alicia, Kalinda, and more.

Bizarre Love Triangle

Sadly, Kelli Giddish—who played Kalinda’s friend Sophia Russo in Season 2—will be appearing only very briefly this season on The Good Wife, as she’s been cast on NBC’s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Giddish’s unavailability threw a wrench into the writers’ plans for both Kalinda and Cary next season, including a love triangle that would have ensnared Kalinda, Cary, and Sophia.

“We’ll be honest: that was a gut punch,” said Robert King. “She gave a really cool energy to Archie/Kalinda, and we were really excited about this idea of this bisexual love triangle with Cary that was just going to keep popping. The difficulty is when you plan on that, and it goes away, we have emergency sessions … Our emergency sessions are not that rare. It was like, OK, how do we rebuild this?”

“We created a new character, Amani, [for] Nicole Beharie,” he continued. “She’s going to be someone we use at the state’s attorney’s office. It won’t be exactly the same mode, but we didn’t want Matt Czuchry to be kind of off there without someone to connect with. That was supposed to be Kelli Giddish. [Sophia] was a good bridge between a Kalinda that doesn’t want to feel anymore and Cary who feels squeezed out by Kalinda’s new [mode]. You’ll see hints of it in the first episode. It’s nothing we cried about more than a day.”